Adriano Bolognino - Your Body Is A Battleground / Sofia Nappi - IMA

Adriano Bolognino and Sofia Nappi are the winners of last year’s Biennale College Danza - Choreographers. Their debut is now confirmed in the commission for two new works by La Biennale.

The title Your body is a battleground refers to the positive/negative image created and disseminated by Barbara Kruger for the women’s march on Washington in 1989, a demonstration demanding women’s rights to self-determination over their bodies, reproductive and abortion rights in the United States. The piece seeks to delve into our individual consciences and into the social awareness of roles today. Who decides what a woman must do or not do? Who decides what she must be or not be? What is the feminine ideal today? What are a woman’s models?

“Ima” in Japanese indicates “the present moment”; in Aramaic and Hebrew it stands for “mother”, as in renascence and renewal. IMA is the product of this time of social distancing during the COVID-19 emergency. Left alone in our real home – our body– where only the dimension of the present exists in time and we become more sensitive to the smaller things, our need for a relationship with the other, when there is no physical contact, fosters a profound sense of interconnection and longing for co-creation. Being alone with our body makes us clearly feel that everything, inside and outside of us, has not stopped but is constantly evolving in a dance that is the interrelationship between all things.

“My choreographic research stems from and concentrates in large part on the use of gesture. I imagine that I am creating an actual ‘dialect’, a language that I can share with the dancers and create through their bodies. Within my creations, great emphasis is given to the clean, aesthetic aspect of the forms and, concurrently, to their total deconstruction. Starting with a gesture, an image, repeat it, break it. Penetrate into the viscera of the dancer without ever losing sight of the exterior aspect. I leave the audience free to translate my language as it desires”.

“Listening deeply to the body, in relation to the space and the circumstances in which it stands, I explore the flow of thought, I listen to the information we harbour within ourselves and in our body, the innate inner sense of rhythm and the impelling desire for movement. I believe irony is essential to experimentation to keep it real: about humanity and the experience we all share, the complex simplicity of living, the reasons that keep us going without ever being sated”.